Last year, when I rated the Top 20 Cigars for 2009, I surprised a lot of people by including the Indie Cigar, the Roxor Maduro as my number 7 Cigar of the Year. While this surprised many people that I rated this cigar ahead of the Liga Privada #9 and the Don Pepin My Father, I found something special with this particular Indie Cigar. Typically when I look for an Indie cigar, I want to find something unique about it. When I smoked the Roxor, I found it was everything a good Maduro cigar should be. While some will argue this was a pre-2009 release, this was (in 2009) the first time I stumbled on it, therefore I included it on my Top 10 list.
Roxor Cigars are made by a company called Perseo Cigar. The founder of Perseo is based out of the Cleveland Ohio area. Right now, Roxor is the single brand of the company – so they are a true Indie company. The name Roxor is a polytome – meaning it is spelled forward and backwards the same way.
The Roxor stick comes with three wrappers – a Venezuelan Natural Wrapper, a Cameroon Wrapper, and a Nicaraguan Maduro wrapper. The binder and filler are all Nicaraguan.
Wrapper: Venezuelan Natural, Cameroon, or Nicaraguan Maduro
Binder: Nicaraguan
Filler: Nicaraguan
It comes in several sizes:
Corona: 5 5/8 x 44
Robusto: 5 x 54
Toro: 6 x 54
Churchill: 7 x 54
Torpedo: 7 x 54
For the purposes of this review, I lit up the Maduro Torpedo. One thing I immediately loved was the presentation of this stick -7″ of pure beauty! The green and black label is dazzling. I immediately put a straight cut into the top of the torpedo, toasted the bottom and began the smoke.
From a taste standpoint, the first tones out of the cigar were a cherry-like sweetness. I love this in a Maduro. The cherry flavors stay with this throughout the smoke. I’ve heard some reviewers mention caramel, but to be honest I have not picked up the caramel overtones. This is not an overly complex stick as it won’t transition a lot. There are some pepper spice notes that become more prevalent about 1/2 way down along with some chocolate flavors, but I still will stand by the cherry flavor throughout. The finish to the cigar was soft, but it was a cool finish. The ending was somewhat bittersweet, but not harsh. Since this was a 7″ stick, I wasn’t too surprised by the finish as I took almost two hours to enjoy this.
The burn was good. I’ve had this stick several times and sometimes it does require a touch-up as seen above. The draw is good – this is going to be a tighter smoke, On occasion I’ve had a bit of tightness with the draw. In general, I found this a cigar that you want to take your time and smoke. The strength is definitely on the Medium to Full side. The body is actually more on the Medium side as I would not categorize the flavors and complexity on the bold side.
The key takeaway is I feel this is what a Maduro cigar should be. It has that natural sweetness, but not overly sugary sweet. This is probably a cigar for the more seasoned Maduro smoker to try and appreciate it. If it were more complex, this would probably qualify for my Memorable assessment. Overal, if you see this at your retailer, definitely check it out. It is good work like this that we should be supporting on the Indie cigar circuit.
Assessment: Nice to Have
